A Growth Agency for Breakthrough Performance
A Business Growth Agency Roadmap to Success
There are four ways to grow your company. You can increase customer acquisitions, improve customer lifetime value, lower customer churn, or modify your prices.
Johnny Grow is a B2B Growth Agency that brings experts, insights and accelerators to help clients improve any one or all of these levers.
B2B and B2C agencies are different. B2C agencies tend to have a marketing-only focus. B2B providers offer an all-of-company approach for step up improvements in marketing, sales, customer service, product R&D and finance.
Growth Agency Best Practices
We use a field-tested methodology called Ascend to help our clients achieve the fastest results in the least time, cost and risk. It's built on evidence-based best practices that replicate the processes and technologies used by the most successful growth companies.
Each of the Ascend best practices is implemented with a prescriptive framework. Each is measured with purpose-built analytics and fully leverages technology automation. And because they are data driven, best practices can be modeled to show investment, cash flow impact, time to value and payback.
Growth Agency Impact Levers
Here are some of the ways we help clients integrate these best practices into an enterprise-wide approach to create predictable, scalable and sustained growth.
Acquiring more customers is most often realized from a two-step process of getting more leads into the sales pipeline and converting more of those leads into customers.
There are several best practices for each step. Some examples to flood the pipeline with qualified leads include the following.
- Revenue Engineering
This is a predictive model to calculate the number of new leads needed to achieve your revenue target. The model displays the company's sales progression in a Lead-to-Revenue funnel. It shows the sales stages, conversions and velocity for all leads as they traverse each stage in the revenue cycle. It displays real-time revenue visibility and date-based predictability. Research findings published in the Marketing Transformation Report revealed companies that use revenue engineering acquire 2.5 times more leads than companies that don't. - Campaign Portfolio Optimization
More effective marketing campaigns will acquire more qualified leads. Campaign portfolio optimization maximizes the impact of the total portfolio. It measures the performance results of each campaign and reallocates budget from low to high performance campaigns in near real-time. The result is more sales leads at a reduced cost per lead. - Lead Management Automation
Automated lead management gets more leads through the revenue funnel in less time. It applies techniques such as lead assignment, routing and escalation. And because these improvements occur early in the funnel even small adjustments create significant increases in the volume of qualified leads sent to the salesforce. It also reduces the common but often unrecognized problem of lead leakage.
Getting more leads into the funnel is step one. Getting more of them to exit the funnel as customers is step two.
An experienced business growth agency will prioritize the methods to increase sales conversions. Some examples may include the following:
- Adopt a Sale Methodology
Sale methodologies shift from what you sell to how you sell. And that shift is extremely influential in improving conversions. Research findings show an optimized sales methodology increases salesforce win rates by 11%. - Apply a Predictable Sales Process
Most companies have a defined sales process. Very few of those processes deliver predictable results. That's because they are not data-driven, embedded into the sellers' daily workflow or automated with CRM software. Research published in the Sales Excellence Report found reps that applied prescribed and predictable selling processes achieved an average 10% higher win rate than those who did not. They were also 53% more likely to achieve their quota. - Create Opportunity Win Plans
Most sales reps don't create a dynamic sale strategy for each sale opportunity. The above referenced research found that only 21% of sellers consistently develop sale opportunity win plans. However, that minority achieved a 6% higher win rate and 10% higher quota attainment. This is another activity that can be semi-automated with CRM software. - Use a Sales Playbook
A playbook will improve salesperson productivity and performance. Plays shift guidance from loosely delivered suggestions to fact-based recommendations. They are precise, prescriptive and predictive. Playbooks can be integrated with CRM software for automated push-based contextual delivery. - Implement Guided Selling
Continuing the prior point, you can use CRM workflow or AI tools to suggest next best plays, actions or other recommendations. This will decrease sales cycle duration and increase seller performance. - Real-time Sales Coaching
One-on-one sales coaching guidance delivers big improvements to sales conversions and sales force quota attainment. But to work, the program must advance from informal and impromptu engagement to intentional and purposeful execution. We often recommend proven programs such as the GROW method. AI agents are another option that can save time and achieve impressive results.
The two steps of flooding the pipeline and increasing conversions will achieve the goal of acquiring more customers.
Research performed for the Business Growth Report found that companies with these types of practices increased revenue growth by an average of 16% within 18 months.
02. Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Strategic Account Management (SAM) is an influential best practice when a minority of key customers deliver much of the company's revenues or profits. These customers are your strategic accounts.
This technique uses a strategic account plan to identify, sequence and forecast future selling opportunities. The Account Plan aligns the company's products or services with the customer's vision and goals. It identifies upsell and cross-sell opportunities over an extended horizon to help customers achieve their evolving priorities.
Other best practices to increase customer lifetime value include customer strategies such as Customer Experience Management (CXM) or a central and shared 360-degree customer view.
More tactical programs include things like nurture marketing campaigns to maintain top of mind awareness and customer service programs that achieve high customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
03. Improve Customer Retention
The ability to improve customer retention creates a significant and sustained improvement to revenue and profit.
Best practices include, but are not limited to, voice of the customer, service level agreements, proactive customer service, technology-facilitated case management, and customer service analytics.
Or you can go a step further and reduce customer churn by preventing it from happening in the first place.
Some believe the ability to predict which customers are flight risks can lower customer attrition. Our experience with clients shows that's not really true. By the time customers show up on a churn forecast report they have incurred frustrations that have festered for quarters or years. Offering apologies or assurances at this point is generally too little too late.
A smarter approach is to build a prediction model that identifies the factors that drive customer churn, measures each factor's impact, and provides prescriptive methods to fix them before customers appear on a flight risk report.
The above predictive model is an example that measures the causes of attrition so they can be resolved to prevent churn.
04. Step Up Your Product Innovation
More executives would create more innovate products and services if they had a systemic method backed with best practices. The Johnny Grow Innovation Methodology can deliver that.
Innovation is created from novel ideas that solve customer problems.
Any company that can find a new or better product, or a new or better way for customers to acquire, consume, use or benefit from a product, will displace incumbents delivering the status quo.
Innovation is a risk-reward equation. When successful, breakthrough products create differentiation and significant improvements to revenue, margins and customer loyalty.
Creating breakthrough products isn't easy, but it's also not optional for companies seeking differentiation and big improvements to revenue, margins and customer loyalty. Growth and comfort do not coexist.
05. Price Optimization
A price strategy shows how to use product or service pricing to increase revenue, profit or market share.
Price optimization models the price variables that impact the quantity sold. It measures how customers respond to price changes. It compares alternative scenarios to maximize financial goals. And it calculates the optimal sale amounts to achieve revenue, profit or market share objectives.
Research published in the Business Growth Report shows that a price strategy with active price optimization increases annual revenues by 2% to 8% annually. And nearly all of the increase falls straight to the bottom line.
Price optimization is underutilized by most companies. That gives adopters the power to create differentiation and make this a competitive advantage.
It Takes a Village
Getting all revenue contributors to rally around a shared company goal, irrespective of their place in the company, is the first step to harmonizing customer interactions and revenue expansion.
It's no small effort but needed to orchestrate enterprise-wide customer engagement and scalable revenue generation, in that order.
Customers won't endure clumsy departmental handoffs or fragmented services among different departments when competitors offer better customer experiences.
So, orchestrated customer engagement must span departmental boundaries to deliver a seamless customer purchase journey. Integrated processes must be defined for customer acquisition, life time value, and retention.
A phased approach often makes sense. For many of our clients, we have found a 2-step process works well. We first align sales and marketing. Then we bring in customer service, and possibly other functions such as R&D, M&A or Finance. A sequenced approach is much more manageable.
A Growth Agency Partner Can Help
Forrester VP and principal analyst Nancy Maluso reports that companies that align people, processes, and technologies across their departments achieved 36% more revenue and up to 28% more profitability.
However, unifying departmental objectives, automating enterprise-wide processes, integrating technology systems and sharing performance analytics is no easy effort.
Fortunately, there are partners that can help.
Johnny Grow is one of those partners. Our staff of experienced revenue architects bring research-based insights, evidence-based best practices, prescriptive methods, and technology accelerators to achieve the benefits shared above.